City of Greater Sudbury Launches Open Data Portal

15-Jul-2015

For Immediate Release
Wednesday, July 15, 2015

The City of Greater Sudbury is proud to announce the launch of its Open Data Portal which will provide residents access to Greater Sudbury’s municipal government data and information in an effort to foster a transparent and open government. Open data is considered one of the four pillars of the open government model adopted by Greater Sudbury Council in March 2015: open data, open information, open dialogue and open doors.

Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.

"City Council is committed to open and transparent government," said Brian Bigger, Mayor of the City of Greater Sudbury. "By providing municipal datasets to the public, we want citizens to have a greater understanding of the city and empower them to use the data to lead, innovate and ultimately create better systems and procedures that will improve service and save money."

The Open Data Portal will launch with 20 datasets, which is a collection of information gathered and compiled into one document. They are as follows:

“We are encouraging the community to really get involved in this movement,” Caroline Hallsworth, Executive Director of Administrative Services for the City of Greater Sudbury said. “We will be showcasing citizen projects by creating a web page that lists apps created with the use of City datasets. We hope this will encourage others to get creative and design projects such as mobile apps or other information-based pieces. As we grow our dataset collection, we hope users will continue to engage with their municipal government.”

The Open Data Portal can be found at opendata.greatersudbury.ca. All City of Greater Sudbury open data can be viewed or downloaded for free. The Portal was created with ArcGIS Online, which allows citizens to search for data, view it in the browser, interact with it and download it in several formats including spreadsheet (CSV), map file (shapefile or KML), or via API access. The City of Greater Sudbury will release more datasets as they become available.